LE QUEYRAS — FOOH “The forest comes to the city”
OFFICE DE TOURISME DU GUILLESTROIS-QUEYRAS
The Guillestrois-Queyras tourist office promotes a valley in the French Alps. This FOOH film places three giant 3D bubbles in the squares of Lyon: inside, the city turns into a larch forest, and the people of the Queyras come out to meet passersby.
The Queyras is a valley in the French Alps, between Guillestre and Monte Viso: larch forests, high-altitude lakes, mountain pasture villages. Its tourist office wanted to make people in Lyon want to visit, and to reach them where they look the most: on their phones, in a feed where a video has one second to stop the thumb.
Hence the choice of a FOOH, short for “fake out of home”: an impossible object, added with 3D animation to real footage of the city. The film opens at night, on an empty square, where a five-meter bubble lights up. By morning there are three of them, on Place Bellecour, Place des Terreaux and Place Antoinette-Fouque, like mushrooms that sprang up overnight. The forests of the Queyras play across their domes; passersby stop, walk around them, take out their phones.
Every bubble is built in 3D, from the dome down to the shadow it casts on the ground. That is where a FOOH succeeds or fails: for people to believe it, the bubble has to reflect the facades and the sky of the square, and stay locked to the image when the camera moves. That camera tracking and light integration follow a protocol we developed ourselves.
Inside, a message asks the visitor to set their phone down on a tree stump. The square speeds up, then transforms: Bellecour becomes a larch forest, a mountain lake opens up on Place des Terreaux, the intersection at Place Antoinette-Fouque is lined with trees. When each of them picks their phone back up, the city has vanished: they are in the Queyras, face to face with the people who live there, a forager, a wood sculptor, a mountain guide. The film does not say a word. It ends on a handshake and three words on screen: “Bienvenue chez nous” (welcome to our home).
The three squares and the inside of the bubbles, shot in a green screen studio, were filmed in a single day, May 16, 2025, with three actors. The people of the Queyras were filmed in their valley, in the fall, when the larches turn orange, and the landscapes by drone. In October 2025, a hook cut for social media was added to the film.
Seven weeks on Instagram
As of October 23, 2026, seven weeks after the first teaser, the bubble posts have passed 600,000 views on Instagram: close to 300,000 for Le Bonbon Lyon's teaser, over 230,000 for the film on the tourist office's account, nearly twelve times its follower count. Teasing, engagement, sharing: the campaign is told in the Queyras case study.
